Saturday, September 10, 2016

Let’s start by asking ourselves a simple question; what value does Facebook
provide to society?

I can already hear people say 'wait a minute', and start to argue that Facebook informs, entertains, connects,
and allows us to stay in touch with family and
friends. Facebook is a social sharing platform that connects people. However,
unlike a Warby Parker or Unilever, it does not make or sell any tangible
products to improve our health or well-being.

It is true that the same can be argued about eBay, Alibaba and Airbnb. They don’t manufacture
goods, but merely facilitate transactions between
buyers and sellers. However, Alibaba is an online mall where third parties sell products and
Airbnb’s service fills a real-world need for accommodation.

With Facebook there is one fundamental difference - you and I are the
product.

Without user-generated content and our friends and family engaging with
it, Facebook makes and offers nothing. It is entirely powered by our routines,
my stories, your creativity,
and our combined curation of third party news and articles we post. Facebook is powered
by you and me.

And their entire revenue model is based on effectively mining, stealing (through an opaque privacy
policy) and selling our personal information to
advertisers; arguably they provide no meaningful benefit to society. As for
connecting us, we already did all this, through letters, movies,
television, travel, newspapers and phone calls, much before Facebook existed.

Technology has certainly made it easier to connect and as a result we
have all become lazier about making the effort to stay in touch; but let’s be clear that there is no innovation in terms of how we
share, build relationships or create emotional bonds that Facebook has
invented.

Consider that the non-technological version of the online platform
existed for millennia in the form of Roman marketplaces and even modern day
malls where people broke bread, socialised and had the ability shop from
multiple vendors,
all under one roof.

Facebook says they offer a forum to express ourselves freely and in
saying that they pretend to
empower us. They claim to be a democratic and open
platform designed “to give people the power to share and
make the world more open and connected” (source:Facebook Mission), when in
reality and behind the scenes, they are doing
exactly the opposite.

They have been caught manipulating our newsfeed, by showing
overwhelmingly negative or positive posts and using us as lab rats to be “part
of a psychological study to examine how emotions can be spread on social
media.” (Source: New
York Times article).

More recently an employee claimed they routinely censor
right-wing content…” (Source: PC
Mag article). Another tech consultant who worked there disclosed
that “Facebook collects all content that is typed into its website,
even if it is not posted…” (Source: Information
Age article).

More worryingly, earlier this year the Wall Street Journal reported that
Facebook was starting to spread its tentacles into the personal lives of
non-Facebook users; going well beyond the four walls of their own platform by
tracking people all over the web under the guise of showing more targeted ads.
“Now Facebook plans to collect information about all Internet users, through
“like” buttons and other pieces of code present on Web pages across the
Internet.(source: Wall
Street Journal).

On the heels of this announcement, we found out that WhatsApp, which
Facebook bought in 2014, is going to start sharing personal user information that
includes your phone number, contact list and status messages with Facebook
(Source: Scroll India article). This after WhatsApp had unequivocally promised
that it would protect users' privacy when they agreed to be purchased by
Facebook. You can read the WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum’s blog post and 2014
promise about how “Respect for your privacy is coded into our DNA…”

Facebook has also announced that they are going to crack down on ad
blockers and click bait headlines to make room for more advertising. They
intend to do this by “making its advertisements indistinguishable from
the status updates, photo uploads, and other content that appears in your news
feed” (Source: PC Mag
article).They justified this change with the now
all too familiar refrain that because Facebook is a free service, they rely on
advertising to keep them going.

A free service that claims unlimited ownership of and rights use every
status update, family picture and personal video. A free service that believes
it has a right to mine personal data, track people around the web, and then
sell all that information to third parties (in non-transparent ways). A free
service that stores personal data “…for as long as it is necessary to
provide products and services to you and others…” and one that defines
their collection of information in the broadest terms possible; “Things
you do and information you provide. Things others do and information they
provide. Your networks and connections. Information about payments. Device
information. Information from websites and apps that use our Services.
Information from third-party partners. Facebook companies.” (Source: Facebook Privacy
Policy). Free indeed!

I understand that we need to give up some privacy in a digitally
connected world,
particularly where we expect things for free. But there also need to be rules around what is permissible and what crosses the
line. Beyond privacy, the greater issue is
that so much information concentrated in the hands of one or two companies
makes conditions ripe for abuse.

The point is not whether Mark Zuckerberg is trustworthy or if he truly
has noble intentions. Nor am I suggesting that Facebook is an evil corporation
run by hobbit in a hoodie. Facebook has already been caught abusing their power numerous times from manipulating the newsfeed to using
sophisticated algorithms to pick, choose
and limit news, articles, politics, entertainment and information we are
able to see and share.

Like every other global corporation in history, they are not immune from
the
temptation to abuse power in the search for growth,
expansion and profits. Their misleading and altruistically packaged
attempt to create a walled off internet, with a Facebook monopoly, in the
developing world is yet another example of business intentions gone totally
awry. You can read my piece about it here “How Facebook Can Fix Internet.org”.

Think about the fact
that, with 1.7 billion active users (a number
that continues to grow), they have greater influence than any government or news
organisation has ever had over our worldview.
They have more personal information and greater power than the Soviet Union had
on its people at the height of communism. This should concern all of us.

The point is that no single company should hold this kind of power and
influence over so many people. It will not end well; human beings are
corrupted by absolute power. We cannot change
the nature of the beast.